This element, essential to all life, is rapidly disappearing from the planet

Of the many things threatening the world’s food supply, the element with the ability to wreak the most havoc hasn’t made many headlines. Researchers are now warning that waning phosphorous levels could devastate food production around the globe. A nonrenewable resource with no synthetic substitute, phosphorous is an essential nutrient and it’s disappearing faster than anyone realized.

Farmers have long been dependent on phosphorous for successful crops, spanning back to the mid-19th century. Increased demand led to a rapid rise in mining in the United States and in China, calving the precious mineral out of the Earth for use in fertilizers that support today’s levels of food production. The rise of meat production, which requires 50 times as much phosphorus as vegetable farming, further accelerated the demand for phosphorus fertilizers, which is expected to double by 2050.

This warning comes from two researchers who have been busy evaluating the chain of events that brought us to where we are today: in a world with an uncertain food future. Together, Charly Faradji, Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry and Marissa de Boer, Project Manager for SusPhos and researcher at VU University Amsterdam, penned a grim description of how phosphorous depletion causes dangerous geopolitical conflicts, environmental problems, and potentially widespread hunger.

“It cannot be replaced and there is no synthetic substitute: without phosphorus, there is no life,” they write.

The solution? Like many other environmental problems currently facing our planet, consumption is key. Reducing our dependence on phosphorous fertilizers would be a giant step toward returning to a time when levels of the precious nutrient were stable. Phosphorous could also potentially be recycled, though the technology is still in development. The sure thing, though, is that phosphorous is an important factor that shouldn’t be ignored any longer.

6 thoughts on “This element, essential to all life, is rapidly disappearing from the planet”

Exactly as Mr. Lent states. Each and every step of this phosphorus issue is a problem unto itself, created by US. When a corporation sets out to try and provide all of a certain food item to the masses is where I feel the problem begins. Why try to grow every single bit of a food source in one state? This leads to the high levels of pollution refrigerating it, transporting it. I personally have seen how one tiny garden that does not even take up 200 sq. ft. can produce enough of what is chosen to be grown, individually with each vegatable grown, enough to feed 6-10 families easy! With tools such as social media today, why this info overdose is not being used at least intelligently enough to lessen burdens on our society, enviroment. I believe today, certain "local families" in certain areas as depicted could choose to live the green lifestyle and make ends meet plus some by gardening and selling their abundances. We already have the demographics in place with our system of counties, at the state, local levels. Just give it a go! Large corporations employ only less than 20% of our populations, but add on exponentially to the carbon footprint, as well as to filling up our landfills with this disposable lifestyles they encourage. Locally grown, locally produced, and let each area spring forth with abundance from there. It would also be an easy way to return to a "family" like lifestyle since families, I believe would become the standard again instead of not being the norm. Well, I have said it, done some reaching, but it smells good, lol......... everyone, just jump in, the waters fine!

Follow the link to the original article from which this is pulled and you get the very key info left out of the inhabitat article: namely that the problem is that our agriculture is as fatally linear as our other production systems.
This is not new. We mine phosphorus, dump it on the fields in excess, let it runs off or erode directly into rivers or indirectly through sewage systems then watch in horror as it eventually overnutrifies ponds, lakes and the ocean - eutrophication - clogging them with algae and phytoplankton, which then die and decay starving the water of oxygen and leading to dead zones.
The problems we already have in our waterways precede and point to the resource exhaustion issue raised here. And the answer to both the waterway eutrophication and the phosphorus resource depletion problems are the same. While the inhabitat article is right that we need to reduce consumption levels, that is not the solution. It will only defer the ultimate crunch, not solve it.
Healthy organic agriculture does not have this resource problem. If we manage and recycle the nutrients in our farms instead of just mining them, pumping them through and then dumping them in the ocean, we will be fine.

How can an element be depleted? Is it leaving earth for another place? Is it being converted by nuclear reaction into another element?
I imagine that the phosphorous is still here and still in soil, but perhaps concentrated in other places than it was before. Some will remain in the soil, and some will be harvested with the plants. Surely we just need to find out where that phosphorous ends up, and reuse it.